Wallace Stevens

Poems & Analysis

Aytekin Aliyeva

Another Weeping Woman Pour the unhappiness out

From your too bitter heart,Which grieving will not sweeten.

Poison grows in this dark.It is in the water of tearsIts black blooms rise.

The magnificent cause of being,The imagination, the one realityIn this imagined world

Leaves youWith him for whom no phantasy moves,And you are pierced by a death.

Analysis• This world is imagination. We live in an imagined world. And

the cause of this woman’s weeping appears to be the absence of imagination. It is one thing to say that our imagination helps us to shape and define our reality. But to say that our imagination is itself the “one reality, ” and the very cause of our being. The absence of imagination made this woman weep.

• “With him for whom no phantasy moves.” this part of the sentence is important. She is not left with him who remains unmoved by a phantasy. Instead, she is left with him “for whom” no phantasy moves. She is left outside of the “one reality, ” with someone incapable of imagining, incapable of “moving” a phantasy. And this incapacity is a death. She weeps because she realizes that it is death time.

Gray Room Although you sit in a room that is gray,

Except for the silver Of the straw-paper, And pick At your pale white gown; Or lift one of the green beads Of your necklace, To let it fall; Or gaze at your green fan Printed with the red branches of a red willow; Or, with one finger, Move the leaf in the bowl-- The leaf that has fallen from the branches of the forsythia Beside you... What is all this? I know how furiously your heart is beating.

AnalysisA girl suffers from her monotonous life.

Because she doesn’t have any bright colors in her life. Her life is just gray. But then she looks around her and sees that even simple things have bright colors and this fact frustrates her and makes her heart beat fast.

He says “I know how furiously your heart is beating” because this is his point of view on what the girl is feeling. He is imagining what is going on in her head.